Quotes about Synchronicity

The day after my steak-and-Singer dinner at the palm I found myself on a plane flying from Atlanta to Denver.  A couple of hours into the flight the pilot, who hadn’t uttered word one until now, came on the public address system to announce, apropos of nothing, that we were passing over Liberal, Kansas.  This was the first, last, and only landmark on our flight path that the pilot deigned to mention, which seemed very odd, given its obscurity to everyone on the plane but me.  For Liberal, Kansas, happens to be the town where my steer, very possibly that very day, was being slaughtered.  I’m not a superstitious person, but this struck me as a most eerie coincidence.  I could only wonder what was going on just then, thirty thousand feet below me, on the kill floor of the National Beef Plant, where steer number 534 had his date with the stunner.
            I could only wonder because the company had refused to let me see.  When I visited the plant earlier that spring I was shown everything but the kill floor.  I watched steers being unloaded from trailers into corrals and then led up a ramp and through a blue door.  What happened on the other side of the blue door I had to reconstruct from accounts of others who had been allowed to go there.   ...

Though we can't always see it at the time,
if we look upon events with some perspective,
we see things always happen for our best interests.
We are always being guided in a way
better than we know ourselves.

Swami Satchidananda

In shamanistic cultures, synchronicities are considered to be teachings as well as sign indicating where one should focus one’s attention, such correspondences demonstrate the usually hidden links between the individual psyche and the larger world.  Synchronicities express themselves through chance meetings and natural events as well as in dreams and supernatural episodes – for instance, among the Secoya shamans, a dream of seeing yourself in the mirror suggests that you will soon encounter a jaguar in the rain forest.  Shamans see such temporal conjunctions as essential aspects of reality, revealing its ultimately dreamlike and magical qualities.

 . . . The mind seeks knowledge as a handle on the cosmos from which it gains leverage for greater control and self-satisfaction, but synchronicity will not allow itself to be used so roughly. Like the flea (on the ‘iron bull’), we must eventually give up our effort to penetrate the impenetrable and surrender to a reality which we cannot master but to which we must submit. In the end, to be honest to our exploration or synchronicity we must ourselves surrender to it. This means to relax and allow the sometimes fickle tide of fate to take its natural course, to let it wash over and benignly carry us. We must sacrifice the urgent, petty agendas of the ego to a larger field or participation. We must learn humility and own humor, finding guidance in intuition and making logic a servant rather than master. Control is a personal experience, surrender is a transpersonal one. Through surrender we learn to move with the rhythms that flow through our existence and in so doing open ourselves to the wellsprings of life that are the gift of the divine Trickster.

"Each of us is all the sums he has not counted. Subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas." Quoted expertly by Douglas Marlette in his exceptional Magic Time.

Be AWAKE to Life